Work continued at a steady pace in week 35 of the remodel, as the electricians began installing light fixtures, while toilets, faucets, trim, and other aspects of the house began to come together.

As we guessed last week, the missing kitchen window was finally installed, closing the door on that chapter at long last. The front door was re-hung, as well, having been taken down to be painted several weeks ago. And the locks and handlesets we picked out were mounted on that door and on the garage entry door, so we could, in theory, program them with numeric passcodes to let us get in and out without having to use the key Enzo has hidden in a lockbox.

The light fixtures Julie and our designer selected seem to be working out well; it’s hard to predict how something is going to look in your home based on tiny pictures on a screen, but we seem to have lucked out so far. Julie had some initial qualms about the island pendants—they reminded her of the Dark Helmet character from the movie Spaceballs!, which I’ve never seen—but eventually her friends convinced her that they would be OK.

The light in the dining area is a knockoff of much more expensive fixtures we have in the Airtime offices in Palo Alto. Our version looks very similar to the original, but came at essentially one fifth the cost. When it arrived, we took notice of its somewhat sketchy packaging and joked that we hoped it wouldn’t burn our house down. The electrician didn’t say anything derogatory about its quality when he installed it, however, so I’m trying to put that possibility out of my mind.

When Julie visited the house on Wednesday, Enzo and the electrician mentioned that they were hurrying to get things ready for an inspection the next day. The electrician also mentioned that we needed bulbs for all our fixtures, and those two statements became conflated—incorrectly, as it turns out—in our minds. That evening, we scrambled to do the research required to figure out what kinds of bulbs we needed for each fixture, and then we made a frantic trip to a couple different Home Depot locations in the area to pick them up. We dashed back to the house to drop them off, taking time to label each box in the rapidly fading daylight, before we headed home, arriving just in time to put William to bed. As this was all unfolding over the dinner hour and beyond, Julia made pizza rolls, so no one went to sleep hungry.

As it turns out, however, all that last-minute hustling around was probably unnecessary: the bulbs were still sitting on the kitchen island when we went by the house on Saturday, and power hasn’t even been connected to the house circuits, so there would have been nothing to prove by having them installed. On the other hand, we would have needed to track down the bulbs at some point anyway, so at least that’s one less thing we have to worry about.

This week, tradesmen also got to work on putting up the brick trim around the base of the house. They’re using a combination of brick salvaged from our chimney during demolition and materials that people were giving away through the local Buy Nothing group. Our hope is that we’ll be able to match the existing trim as closely as possible, and avoiding having to purchase all-new materials is an added bonus.

Another nice consequence of picking up recycled brick around the neighborhood was getting an opportunity to put the kids to work loading it into the van, unloading it at the house, and stacking it neatly in the front yard. I’m not sure they derived as much satisfaction from the activity as I did, but it made for a fun afternoon family project.

I’m very happy we were able to preserve this aspect of the design—it wasn’t in some of the early architectural drawings, and I was somewhat stubborn about restoring it. It provides a link to the house as it was before the remodel, and I’ve always liked the look of brick, anyway.

We expect that things will continue to move quickly next week, as well. Enzo told Julie that he’s planning to be finished by the middle of June, but walking around the site, it seems as though there’s a lot left to do in a relatively short period of time.

Gallery: Week 35: Fixtures

One thing is clear from the activity in week 34 of our project: we’re well past the point where each week’s progress fits into a coherent theme. Instead, there’s a sense of controlled chaos at the house, with a variety of different activities taking place every day as we careen toward the finish line.

The big story this week is that the skylights have finally been installed, bringing us one step closer to (or one kitchen window short of) a house that can actually be closed up and secured without the use of a hammer and nails. We—and especially Julie—had been eagerly waiting to see what the great room would look like with sunlight coming in through the skylights, and we weren’t disappointed. The whole room felt brighter and more alive, including the kitchen tile, which also benefitted from the addition of grout between the tiles to provide a bit of contrast.

There’s good news on the window front, as well: as we were snooping around the garage over the weekend, we noticed a large box from Marvin. At first, I thought it was one of the windows we’d been sent erroneously during the winter, but on closer inspection, we noticed that it bore a shipping date in early May. It looks as thought the kitchen window has finally arrived, and we’re looking forward to seeing it installed soon.

The timing of the window’s delivery seems fortuitous, as Enzo told us a few weeks ago that he couldn’t get started on painting the exterior of the house due to its absence. Either coincidentally or as the result of careful planning on Enzo’s part, the painters started work on the stucco this week. They seem to have covered most of the front of the house, though the eaves and trim aren’t done yet.

We’re doing our best to match the yellow color we had before, and the painter went so far as to put together some samples for Julie to pick from, as he thought that the color our designer had originally selected wasn’t a close enough match. We’re pleased with how things are turning out, and hope that the new color will work well with the larger elements of white trim we’ve added during construction.

As if that wasn’t enough, we were more than a bit surprised to see that our new garage door was installed during the week. We had picked out the model we wanted just a couple weeks ago, so it seemed logical to expect that it would be a few more weeks before it could be delivered, based in no small part on our experiences with other big ticket items. Happily, however, our expectations were confounded in this case.

Work continued in a number of other areas, as well: the bathroom tile seems to be more or less complete, including the floors, and the sink and faucet were installed in the laundry room. There was some question in my mind as to whether there was enough room for the broad base of the faucet to fit between the edge of the sink and the backsplash, but the crew made things work. On the electrical front, the doorbell, under-cabinet lights, and various switch plates were set up, but the interior and exterior lighting fixtures still await installation.

The week’s excitement wasn’t limited to the construction work, either. At the beginning of the week, Enzo mentioned that it would be a good idea for us to make sure our appliances were available on-site so that his team could install them when the time came. Sure enough, by the end of the week, the new dishwasher, which we’d had delivered directly to the house, was in set up in the kitchen.

That left us to figure out what to do with our old appliances, which have been sitting in the garage of our rental for the last eight months. In fact, we’ve been putting our refrigerator to good use throughout the project, using it to keep pop cool and to allow us to keep extra staples, like fruit and milk, on hand so that we could make fewer trips to the store during the pandemic. Living with a spare refrigerator has spoiled us: it’s going to be a real challenge to re-learn how to get by without the extra space, and I’ll miss the luxury of knowing that there’s always a chilled bottle of Diet Coke just a few feet away.

Faced with the task of getting these items over to the house—they wouldn’t fit in Julie’s van, even if it were available for use at the moment—Julie looked at the available options and their associated costs and decided to rent a truck from U-Haul. It wasn’t a small truck, either: because we were moving large, heavy appliances, we wanted a ramp, and the smallest truck U-Haul offers with a ramp is the fairly gargantuan 15-foot moving truck. We picked up the vehicle early on Saturday and planned to be finished with it by the next morning, so that we could get by with a one-day rental.

Getting the appliances into the van proved to be relatively straightforward, with help from Julie and Joe. We loaded the four items (washer, dryer, range, and refrigerator) around midday and planned to unload them at the house later in the afternoon, after William’s baseball game. We thought that the unloading process would most likely be easier, and that the hard part was finished. Reader, we were very, very wrong.

The plan had been for us to open up the front door of the house, carry the appliances up the front steps using the appliance dolly we’d rented along with the truck, and leave them in the laundry room and great room for Enzo and crew to deal with when they were ready. Unfortunately, things went off the rails more or less immediately. The temporary front door was secured to the frame using a piece of wood and some Torx screws. One of the workers mentioned to Julie on Friday that he could leave behind a screwdriver that would allow us to remove the wood and open the door, but there wasn’t a screwdriver anywhere to be found, and we didn’t think we had enough time to run to the store to buy one in time to finish up before dark. Instead, we were down to plan B.

Plan B was to wheel the appliances around the garage to the back of the house and take them in through the patio doors. Simple, right? Unfortunately, not as simple as we’d hoped. First, it’s important to remember that the house sits on a construction site. The yard, or what’s left of it, is not a smooth expanse of carefully maintained surfaces; it more closely resembles a rocky, pitted moonscape. Second, Enzo and his crew had just poured the concrete for the driveway and patio the previous week. In preparation, they’d dug out the areas around the locations to be paved to construct the wooden frame that would give the concrete shape. Those dug-out areas were still there, as as you can see in this photo, which meant that we’d have to get the appliances across no fewer than three miniature chasms to get to the patio from our front walk.

We scrounged around the shed to find a piece of plywood to use as a makeshift ramp between the front yard and the left side of the driveway, and got to work trying to move the refrigerator: we figured that if we got the biggest and heaviest appliance out of the way first, the others would be a comparative cinch. It did not go well. The plywood we’d found turned out to be neither wide enough nor long enough to make an effective ramp on its own. As soon as we started crossing over the the driveway, the refrigerator began to tip precariously to the right, and only with the help of Joe and our next-door neighbor, who happened to be walking by, were we able to prevent it from falling and and pull it onto the driveway.

Undaunted, we looked around the yard and found a second piece of plywood we could combine with the first to make a bigger, theoretically more stable, ramp to get us from the driveway over to the side yard. We placed the two pieces of wood side-by-side and began to move the refrigerator across, but quickly discovered that the still-unstable two-piece ramp, combined with the very small area in which we had to make a 90° turn, made the strategy fundamentally untenable, at least for amateurs like us. We weren’t at risk of losing the refrigerator on this attempt, but neither did we come close to making it across.

This left us in something of a bind. As I mentioned, we wanted to return the truck by morning so that we wouldn’t have to pay for another day, but we didn’t have a clear path to getting the appliances into the house before dark. Furthermore, we weren’t excited by the prospect of leaving our appliances inside the parked truck on the street overnight (and we definitely weren’t going to leave our refrigerator sitting in the driveway). That’s when Julie came up with a brilliant idea that was staring us right in the face all long.

If you’ve read this far, you may recall that one of the advances we were excited about this week was the installation of an actual garage door. We didn’t have the means to get the appliances safely into the house, Julie reasoned, and we didn’t want to leave them parked on the street overnight, so why not leave them in the garage? We could ask Enzo whether he wanted us to come back during the week to move them inside (with the front door unlocked this time), or, if he preferred, we could leave them for his crew to move when they were ready for them.

This left us with the relatively easy task of figuring out how to open the garage door without electrical power, which we managed without too much difficulty. We successfully transported the remaining appliances off the truck, over the ramp to the driveway, and into the garage, and were able to return the truck with time to spare the next morning. Somehow, after all that, we failed to take any pictures of the freshly unloaded appliances, but mostly I was happy I hadn’t dropped the refrigerator on Joe.

Gallery: Week 34: Skylights, Stucco, and Adventures in Moving

Work continued at a frenetic pace in week 33 of our remodel. By the end of the week, the house had a paved driveway and garage; finished floors throughout much of the ground level; light fixtures, albeit without a connection to power; and, somewhat to our surprise, actual locking doors.

The doors caught us off guard because, although we sent over the locks we intend to use a few weeks ago, Enzo didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to install them, despite his previously expressed interest in making the site secure. The gaping hole where our kitchen window is supposed to be may have played a role in the slow pace of progress on this front. Additionally, we knew from a mid-week visit that the front door wasn’t actually installed: the crew had removed it
so that the painters could paint it. It’s hard to lock a door that isn’t there.

With all that in mind, we were shocked to find that the house was locked up tight when we swung by for our customary visit on Saturday. The roofers were there, continuing their work from much earlier in the project, but they didn’t have access to the interior, nor could they tell us how to get in. The garage door was secured with an obviously temporary deadbolt, and the front of the house was closed up with an even more obviously temporary door. We were a bit pressed for time, so we couldn’t do much more than peek in through the windows before leaving, but there was no obvious way in. Luckily, Enzo responded that evening when we texted him asking for instructions, and we were able to make a successful return visit the next day.

The driveway and patio turned out more or less exactly as we’d expected and hoped. Whether or not we’ll have room for me to park and charge my car inside the garage—a question we still haven’t resolved fully—just being able fit both cars side-by-side in the driveway is a tremendous upgrade over the old configuration, which all too often required one of us to move our vehicle (often in our pajamas) so that the other could leave for work or school.

The patio is definitely going to be a bit tight. We’ll have to do what we can to optimize for the available space and see how things work out. If it’s simply not workable, we can always fix it by expanding the surface, but we’d like to avoid an outcome that could end up costing us thousands of dollars.

I met with the electrician, Jamie, on Tuesday to walk through our plans and nail down a few decisions, such as the number and placement of outlets on the kitchen island. We decided to hold off on installing the interior surface-mounted fixtures for the time being so that they wouldn’t end up covered with dust as other workers installed the floors, but by the end of the week, the recessed lighting was in place throughout the house, as were many of the wall plates for switches and outlets. Some of them ended up a bit askew, but Enzo assures us that he’ll take a look at them.

The installation of the laminate flooring also progressed surprisingly quickly. I stopped by in the middle of the week to drop off some hardware and fixtures we had purchased, and they were just getting started in the living room. By the time we visited on Sunday, the living room, front hallway. and laundry room were complete, and only a small portion was still unfinished in the great room. The office wasn’t done yet, but Enzo tells us that things will be far enough along that we can actually start bringing over appliances this week.

As the floor was being installed, work also began on adding false treads, or end caps, to the stairs. The idea is to provide the appearance of full hardwood construction under the carpeted runner without the associated expense.

In the meantime, true to form, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of reading about how to to care for laminate floors. There are a surprising numbers of dos and don’ts, and, as always, people on the Internet have very strong opinions about the One True Way to keep them looking clean and new. I’m sure it will work out fine, but a part of me remains worried that I’m going to dump a full pot of hot spaghetti on them in the first week, turning them into a stained, warped mess.

The week’s developments weren’t without wrinkles. As I mentioned, a number of the electrical wall plates aren’t level, either with the floor or with other nearby plates. That seems relatively easy to fix; a bigger mystery is the appearance of a mysterious bulge in one area where our master bathroom wall meets the ceiling. We have no idea whether this is a purely cosmetic concern or indicative of a more significant structural problem, but we’re counting on Enzo to let us know.

Perhaps most disappointing was the disappearance of a wall-mounted bookcase from Joe’s room that we’d saved from his old bedroom downstairs before demolition started. We kept it in storage over the winter, and took it back to the house a couple weeks ago when Enzo gave us the OK to start bringing things back. Our best guess is that someone mistook it for trash and either tossed it in the dumpster or took it home, but even assuming that there was no ill intent, it’s still a bit disappointing.

Gallery: Week 33: Floors

In week 32 of the remodel, Enzo and his team continued to make rapid progress on the house. The interior painting is very nearly done, including our bright, cheery, and very yellow laundry room, and the office, which we switched to blue at the last minute. The upstairs bathrooms haven’t been painted yet—we think they want to wrap up the tile there first—and we have a few questions about some trouble spots in the master bathroom, but otherwise the painters seem to be wrapping up inside.

Likewise, the countertops seem to be finished and installed just about everywhere. They’re largely covered up, presumably for protection, but you can see them peeking through here and there,

There’s a separate set of people dedicated to working on tile, and they’ve been chugging along, as well. Julia’s shower is mostly finished, other than the alcove for shampoo and soap, and they’re off to a good start in the boys’ bathtub. They haven’t started on the bathroom floors yet, but we’re looking forward to those being finished soon.

As smoothly as things are going, we did run into a bit of a hiccup regarding the tile color for Julia’s bathroom. Initially, we had picked out a green that we thought would play off the green color on her bedroom walls, but that shipment was unexpectedly delayed for reasons that are unclear; for all we know, we can attribute the holdup to recent problems in the Suez Canal. As a fallback, we decided to go with white tiles, but we encountered shipping delays for those, also. Finally, we settled on some tile we had initially conceived as a backup for the boys’ bathroom. Although they weren’t the strong green color that we had originally aimed for, we thought that they might read as a greenish blue in context. This may have been a bit optimistic: the bathroom isn’t finished yet, but to my untrained eye, they look pretty darn blue. They do look very nice, however.

Toward the end of the week, the crew began setting up to pour concrete for the driveway and patio. Happily, we were able to preserve the existing front porch and sidewalk, which will save us a bit of money, but the driveway and patio by themselves are fairly expensive items.

For the driveway, we’re keeping the current, narrow opening to the street, which saves the tree in our parkway that would otherwise be in the way. About twelve feet after the sidewalk, the driveway will gradually widen to line up with the full width of two-car garage, leaving enough room for us to park our cars side-by-side with sufficient clearance for either one of them to back out without having to move the other.

In the back yard, the new patio will have the same basic shape as the old one, but it will be much shallower, because the we’ve moved the back of the house much further out than it was before. The new patio’s size is a compromise aimed at preserving as much of the yard as we could, and it’s distinctly possible that it will feel a bit tight once we set up our table, chairs, and assorted plants. Happily, however, we were able to put in a request for brick trim around the border of the patio, which will make it look a little more finished and also provide a subtle callback to the look of the old patio.

By Saturday, the team had cleared out the areas to be paved and set up wooden braces and rebar to shape and support the concrete. The plan was to pour the concrete early the next week so it would be safe to walk on by the end of the week, if not to haul in heavy items on dollies and hand trucks: Enzo wants to make sure we given it sufficient time to harden before we do anything that might scratch it.

As you’ll see in the photos, one sticking point that we haven’t yet overcome is the window over the kitchen sink. Or, more accurately, the lack of a window over the kitchen sink. The salesman originally ordered the wrong size window for the space; he subsequently put in a new order for a window with the correct dimensions, but that order has since been delayed. In the meantime, our old living room curtains remain nailed up over the opening to keep the elements at bay—it’s fortunate that we have very predictable weather here—and various other aspects of the project remain on hold as a consequence of the missing glass, including: completion of the stucco; exterior painting; sections of the kitchen backsplash; interior paint in the kitchen; and the installation of exterior electrical fixtures. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there’s a clear resolution in sight, which is a source of frustration for us and for Enzo.

I wish I could say that this would be resolved by the end of next week, but I’m actually writing this at the end of next week, and at the risk of spoiling next week’s post, I can confidently say that it is not, in fact, resolved.

Gallery: Week 32: Countertops and Tile